Research On Application Of The Multi-Agent Technology In Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is the new development direction and focus of the logistics field. Agent technology is being a powerful tool of breaking through the bottleneck of the supply chain management technology. Some scholars have tried to apply Multi-Agent technology into supply chain management and used multi-agent model to describe the supply chain management system. But research is still at the stage of basic theoretical research. Agent and supply chain management techniques which are not mature enough are in the development stage, so there are many places which need to be improved and researched.The thesis studies how to apply multi-agent technology into supply chain management from the application point of view and tries to implement supply chain management with multi-agent technology. The main work and innovations are as follows:1. Building a multi-agent supply chain management system model based on "pull-type" supply chain management which takes into account every node of the supply chain. The model has a certain commonality. Taking into account the characteristics of multi-agent system, the thesis designs yellow-page agent and white-page agent included in the system model to manage the agent services, as well as the life cycle and unique identifier of agents.2. Implementing a suit of solution of communication and coordination mechanism of the procurement decision-making agent. Based on the design of structure and intelligence of procurement decision-making, the thesis designs the interactive protocols and communication mechanism in collaboration and extends the performatives of the FIPA agent communication language.3. Designing an evaluation model of comprehensive ability of provider, and also optimizing the selection and performance evaluation of provider. The thesis optimizes the selection of provider combining with the evaluation model. The performance evaluation is optimized through designing intelligent reminding mechanism which reduces the risk of procurement.4. Implementing the decision-making agent under the JADE platform. Message ontology, Message template and other key technologies are implemented. The class of procurement decision-making agent is fulfilled to implement its functions. Finally, procurement decision-making agent generates through launching platform and procurement decision-making agent.5. Designing and implementing the security of the system respectively from different levels. According to the features of distributed system, it is designed that through cloning the main container to protect the fault-tolerant platform in the basic structure level, adopting authentication, permission and message signature and encryption in the application level to guarantee the security of the system.The studies in the thesis show that agent can be rapidly formed multi-agent supply chain management system to implement supply chain management through utilizing the interaction and communication between agents to describe the complex relationship between the supply chain nodes. The intelligence of agent can effectively help users to work. It is believed that the research in this thesis has a further reference value of the application research of multi-agent technology.